A Chinese citizen journalist who chronicled desperate scenes from Wuhan at the onset of the pandemic has now been detained for over three years.
On Feb. 9, the U.S. Congress and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China called on the Chinese regime to immediately release the man, Fang Bin.
“#FangBin, a citizen journalist and #FalunGong practitioner, was detained 3 years ago today for reporting on the #COVID19 outbreak. The Chairs seek his immediate release and the release of all those detained for reporting on the COVID-19 outbreak in China,” the panel said on Twitter.
The communist regime has aggressively suppressed information related to COVID and downplayed the severity of outbreaks since the first infection emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.
Many Chinese citizens who sought to report unfiltered information about the pandemic—including doctors, citizen journalists, scholars, and business people—have been targeted by the regime and have ended up in jail cells.
Fang Bin, a traditional clothes salesman in Wuhan, began filming his trips to hospitals around the locked-down city and posting the videos online in late January 2020. The scenes showed long lines outside hospitals, patients clinging to life, and distraught family members.
In one widely circulated video, Fang counts eight body bags in a van parked outside a hospital. “So many dead,” he says with a sigh. “This is too many.” Fang then walks into a room in the hospital, where doctors are seen working around a patient who had apparently just died.
“Who is he?” Fang asks the man.
“My father,” the man cries.
“He’s gone,” Fang says, after speaking to the doctors.
That evening, around half a dozen masked men in hazmat suits knocked on his door, demanding to take his temperature. Fang, who recorded the incident, said his temperature was normal and asked them to come back with an inspection warrant. The men forced their way into his house, confiscated his electronic devices, and took him to a police station. There, police questioned him about his videos, Fang later recounted.
Less than two weeks later, Fang went missing. His friends told The Epoch Times that Fang had been detained.
A pro-democracy activist (C) from HK Alliance holds a placard of missing citizen journalist Fang Bin as she protests outside the Chinese liaison office in Hong Kong on Feb. 19, 2020. Isaac Lawrence/AFP via Getty Images
Since then, there has been no information on his condition.
This has prompted concerns, particularly in light of Fang’s adherence to Falun Gong, which has been the object of a brutal persecution campaign by the communist regime. During the past two decades, millions of adherents of the ancient practice—which emphasizes truth, compassion, and tolerance—have been thrown into various detention facilities, where they have been brainwashed, tortured, or even killed for their organs.
Fang’s current whereabouts are unclear. In November of 2021, a local official told The Epoch Times that Fang had been detained at Wuhan’s Jiang’an Detention Center. But in January, a staff member of the detention facility who answered the phone said no one by that name was being held at the institution.
Detained Citizen Journalists
Fang is not the only Chinese citizen who remains in detention facilities after offering the outside world a first-hand glimpse of the early COVID-19 situation in the country.
Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer turned journalist, is serving a four-year jail term. In early 2020, Zhang traveled to Wuhan from Shanghai and recorded the lives of citizens at the pandemic’s epicenter during an initial lockdown. She detailed her visits and interviews in hospitals, quarantine centers, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in dozens of videos uploaded to YouTube. The shaky cellphone videos challenged authorities’ narratives.
Xu Na, in an undated photo taken in China. The Epoch Times
She was later convicted of “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” a charge often used to prosecute dissidents and whistleblowers, and was sentenced to four years in prison.
The most recent case was that of Xu Na, a still-life painter and Falun Gong practitioner who had photographed the effects of the pandemic during its early stages and shared those images with the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times. Xu was sentenced to eight years in prison last January.
Eva Fu and Cathy He contributed to this report.
Dorothy Li
Author
Dorothy Li is a reporter for The Epoch Times. Contact Dorothy at [email protected].
